[okfn-discuss] Guardian article on visualising US public domain data

Thu Jan 22 01:17:31 UTC 2009

Article about US public domain data, formats, and visualisation.

J.

# Handy resources for data wonks
# http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2009/jan/15/unitedstates-data-journalism-google-spreadsheets
# Simon Rogers gathers some of the key figures driving the political
agenda in the United States. Download the data or access the API to
build your own charts and visualizations.

The Guardian collected and republished a series of public domain
figures about the United States including Deaths and casualties in
Iraq, Poverty rates by State, Public debt, etc. Here is a partial
complete list:

    * US public debt from 2001, US Treasury
    * State population by race
    * CO2 emissions by state
    * Illegal migrants by state
    * World CO2 emissions
    * US2008 election results by county
    * US population by state
    * Iraq deaths by state
    * US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
    * Household income by state
    * Unemployment by state
    * Poverty rate by state
    * GDP raw data

Simon Rogers gathered this information and shared the raw data via
Google Spreadsheets for anyone to use. This means that people can grab
the data in whatever format is most desirable including text, .csv,
.xls, and .pdf.

Since access is open on each spreadsheet, it also means that
developers can write client applications that interact directly with
the data. Developers can access the same source data as either XML or
JSON.

There are several different kinds of data visualizations that can be
built off the data.

For example, you can build animated graphs using Google's Motion
Charts (formerly 'Trendalyzer' from GapMinder.org). This video shows
the change in the US population by region from 2000 to 2008.

As the bubbles move through time, you can see the South is the largest
and fastest-growing region, and the West region overtook the Midwest
somewhere around 2002. The Northeast population appeared to stall
completely over the period and remains the smallest population group.

The data can tell some interesting stories when visualized through
tools like Swivel and IBM's Many Eyes, as well. This chart shows the
CO2 emissions in tonnes by US State:

Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota and West Virginia stand out dramatically
when viewed on a per capita basis.

There are several tools that can help people make use of the data
programmatically. You can use the Spreadsheet Autofilter which turns
any Google Spreadsheet into a sortable table. The Spreadsheets Map
Wizard will help anyone who wants to build a more customized annotated
Google Map based on data in a Google Spreadsheet. There are also some
dynamic plotter tools that use things such as PlotKit to generate
graphs off hosted spreadsheets. And Google has a gallery of
visualization tools that can be used with Google Spreadsheets.

If you want to use the .csv, .xls or other formats from any of the
spreadsheets above, look in the 'File' menu in the Google Spreadsheets
interface and select 'Export'.